Hi,
I'm having a strange boot issue with OPNsense on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny and I'm trying to determine whether this is related to FreeBSD/OPNsense, EFI console handling, or the Lenovo firmware.
Hardware / system:
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny
- Intel Core i5-8400T
- 8 GB RAM
- Toshiba NVMe SSD
- Intel I350-T4 PCIe NIC
- Onboard Intel I219-V
- Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 (currently unused)
- OPNsense 26.7.3_8
- UEFI boot
- Latest Lenovo UEFI/BIOS installed (the same problem was already present with the previous UEFI/BIOS version, so updating to the latest firmware did not resolve it)
The problem is that the machine sometimes hangs during boot or reboot when running headless.
When a monitor is connected via DisplayPort before powering on/rebooting, the machine appears to boot/reboot reliably. Without a monitor, cold boots and reboots can randomly hang.
When it hangs, OPNsense does not become reachable over the network. Connecting a monitor after the machine has already started/hung does not produce any video output either — the monitor has to be connected before boot for video output to work.
Interestingly, after a failed boot, forcing the machine off and starting it again will often result in a successful headless boot.
After some research, I came across the following article describing a very similar issue with OPNsense systems not booting without a monitor:
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/OPNsense_does_not_boot_without_monitor
Following the recommendation in that article, I changed the console configuration to:
Primary Console: Serial Console
Secondary Console: VGA Console
Subjectively, this seemed to make the system somewhat more reliable, although the boot issue was still present. The reboot could still hang; however, in this configuration a short press of the power button was sufficient to shut the machine down from the hung state, whereas previously I sometimes had to hold the button for a forced power-off.
During boots/reboots with a monitor connected, however, I noticed the following messages from the FreeBSD loader:
no valid consoles!
console vidconsole is unavailable
The loader also listed the available consoles as:
Available consoles:
efi
eficom
comconsole
nullconsole
spinconsole
Since "efi" was available while "vidconsole" was explicitly reported as unavailable, I changed the configuration again to:
Primary Console: EFI Console
Secondary Console: None
With this configuration, the console warnings disappeared completely, and headless reboots also seem to have become more reliable. However, the underlying problem is not completely solved: cold boots without a monitor can still occasionally hang, while other cold boots with exactly the same configuration succeed normally.
Using EFI Console therefore appears to be the more appropriate console configuration for this UEFI system, but I am not yet sure whether the console configuration is actually related to the root cause of the intermittent headless boot issue.
The particularly strange behavior is:
Monitor connected before boot:
boot/reboot appears reliable
No monitor:
cold boot/reboot may hang
OR may boot completely normally
Failed headless boot:
power off -> another headless cold boot often works
The system is already running the latest Lenovo UEFI/BIOS. The issue also occurred with the previous firmware version, so this does not appear to be a regression introduced by the latest UEFI update.
At this point I have left the console configuration at:
Primary: EFI Console
Secondary: None
since this matches the consoles actually provided by the UEFI loader and avoids the "vidconsole is unavailable" warning.
Has anyone seen similar behavior with the Lenovo M720q/M920q or other Intel Coffee Lake systems running FreeBSD/OPNsense?
Any suggestions for further diagnostics would be appreciated. I would prefer to identify where the boot actually stops before randomly changing hardware or loader tunables.
Thanks!
Not quite your problem, but I've had some Linux servers/clients where not having a monitor connected caused issues.
I resolved them but using a display emulator plugged into a video port.
e.g. DisplayPort display emulator/EDID emulator Plug
Yes, a display emulator would be a relatively easy but not a really satisfying fix, but yeah, I will consider this when I run out of options.